Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Nunsploitation is a genre unto itself. I remember once entering the abandoned home of a hoarder who had passed away and her family didn't want her stuff. Every single room of the house required you to walk hunched over because the "floors" were about four feet of stuff above the actual floor. Anyway, she had bags of nurse romance novels in there. There were more pulp fiction versions of the genre however, such as this one.

Monday, February 07, 2011

Done with an exhausting, but rewarding, day of instruction. Now, I'm going to sleep in my new place. Le sigh. I went with the house full of dudes renting a small, cheap room. Was going with a place that is a bit thrash really a good idea? No idea. I'm still trying to figure out if getting my own place was a good idea.

Sunday, February 06, 2011

Oh, how I wish I could join...

No offense to the "Greater Toronto Area" or upstate New York, but they're not exactly hotbeds of unusual people. Sure, Toronto is a creative mecca in Canada, but let's be honest, Canadians are sort of beige people anyway. You know what I mean? Quiet, polite, and conventional.

So where do you go to find abnormals? And don't say the Internet! Talking shop with a weirdo in Desmoines, Iowa is not the same as, well, hanging out in a living room, knitting and smoking cigars with other abnormals. If you're strange, do you eventually have to move to San Francisco?

Friday, February 04, 2011

Wow, teaching is hard. This is my first time teaching my own course and it's a bit like watching your kid play little league baseball- thrilling, nerve-wracking, very rewarding, but you could also rip the lungs out of the naysayers. Of course, here, I feel a bit guilty because the naysayers are the one or two 'difficult' students in the class, and I was once a difficult student myself. Well, in high school anyway.

This reminds me that the website "Rate Your Students" just shut down. I didn't much like it. The idea was to respond to sites like "Rate Your Professor" in which students bitch about their profs. Here, instructors, adjuncts and profs would anonymously post stories about terrible students in order to blow off steam. I guess they ran out of that steam eventually.

The problem I had with the site was the weird power imbalance- students are already being 'rated' by their instructors, so why rate them again? Part of why students can be so insufferable is that they're stressed out, frustrated, worried, and not really enjoying college in the first place. They all seem to want to be in grad school, which is probably a mistake. So, they bitch and complain. And some of them behave insufferably in class. The answer is not to behave as childishly online.

Of course, with universities phasing out tenure and replacing profs with temp workers, being liked by the students is more important for people's continued employment, so the stress goes both ways. To be honest, what would be best overall would be to do away with grading and rating for everyone and just have salons and discussion groups and learn together. But that wouldn't prepare the students to face the same stupid shit in the working world that they now face in college.

I came across this article about the effects of porn consumption on relationships, and I found it interesting. It's incomplete, and very biased, and not at all scientific. But it articulates, from the male point of view, something I have observed myself. Namely, the bond between a man and his porn can damage the bond between a man and his woman.

Thursday, February 03, 2011

Been feeling down, so I called the suicide prevention hotline. Apparently they're outsourcing now. I got a guy in Mumbai who told me if I killed myself, I'll be reincarnated into a lower caste.

I went and told the priest I was depressed. He reminded me that, if a man commits suicide, God does not allow him into the kingdom of heaven. He then suggested some ways I could make it look like an accident.

Wednesday, February 02, 2011

So my friend broke up with his girlfriend recently when he found out she was cheating on him. And I felt bad for him, but still, you have to admit that we men got away with murder on his whole monogamy concept. How did we ever convince women to go along with that?

Imagine the first man that ever proposed this idea.

Some caveman talking to a cavewoman...

"Okay, so here's the thing. As a woman, you're going to be strikingly atttractive to every single man you meet. Pretty much every one of them is going to turn into a Tex Avery cartoon wolf if you wear anything slightly form-fitting. Every one of them would crawl across broken glass for the chance to have sex with you. A surprising number of girls would too. And you know, eventually we'll create magazines and movies to try to convince you that it's only like that for the really hot women- but, the truth is, all of you women are beautiful and could have sex with about 60% of the other human beings you encounter. Sound good?

"Okay, now here's the next thing- you can have multiple orgasms- you can come like 12, 15 times in an hour and be fine. Meanwhile, men have to take a nap after jerking off. And, unlike men, you'll reach your sexual peak as you get older. So, you're sexually superior and attractive to about half the population. Hypothetically, you could spend all day having all sorts of sex with all sorts of interesting individuals or groups of individuals."

"Okay, now don't get so excited! Here's what we were thinking: instead of having all sorts of incredible sex with lots of different people, how about you commit yourself to one man for life and he'll just get older and fatter and balder as the years go by and eventually want to pop off on you about once a week. All this could be yours! What do you say? I'll get my secretary to get the paperwork together.

"You don't want this? Oh, boy. Let's go to Plan B. If you do anything else, we'll call you a 'slut'. Slut? It's a word we just made up for a woman who does what any man would do if he had breasts and a vagina. It's terrible. You don't want to be called that.

"Oh... you're not worried about being called a slut? Oh, boy...

"Hey, Larry! It's not working! Why don't you start writing that Bible we were talking about!"